ABSTRACT
This study examines the media systems of sixteen Western European countries (excluding some very small countries), together with the United States of America (hereafter ‘US’) and Canada. These all are developed countries, with capitalist market economies and formally democratic political structures. Our focus is on the shared characteristics and variations in their media systems. These systems are comparable in their overall patterns of economic development, and in their political history. We might go further and speak of common cultural attributes, but here the historical and the mythic can become dangerously fused. In order to understand what is meant by ‘Western media systems’ (WMS) we need to examine how the relevant ideas and concepts have been developed and disputed. This chapter begins by introducing some key terms and then examines how media systems have been characterised and compared.
